I'd like a glass of Wine.

So, it was going to happen eventually. Wine. Oh yeah, I definitely like you. So here, let's have a toast and- wait a minute. You're a program? FML.

Anyway, I've decided to get Wine on my lappytop because a good fwiend of mine asked me to pway a game with her and I'm sort of a nice guy, so I told her about this complicated process and she said forget about it. But I say nay! If it were anyone else, I'd probably have said "nawh." As it stands, I'll be installing Wine.

First things first, open the Ubuntu Software Center and search for Wine. Install it. Simple as that. Now that it's on your system, we have the fun part to take care of. You know the drill, Ctrl+Alt+T. Once the terminal is open we have to do the initial setup. This is just the basic configuration.

$ winecfg

That's it. Click OK to close the window.

Now that it's all set (easy huh) you probably want to download and install some files.

So yeah, you've got a game downloaded. For the purpose of showing you the commands, let's pretend the game is the_sims_2_v4.5.exe. First you want to put the exe somewhere convenient, like the desktop. Now that it's in the desktop you need to change directory to desktop. That's done by using the CD command.

$ cd ~/Desktop

and it's mounted. Now you want to tell Wine to run the exe so you can play The Sims! You know you want to play The Sims. You can't help it, their life is better than yours! you want to tell wine to run the file name. In this case it's The Sims. So, it would look like this:

$ wine the_sims_2_v4.5.exe

Press enter and give it a minute to process, and the installer should be all set and ready to go. Pretty simple stuff. If you want to uninstall something using Wine, and I don't know why you'd want to break The Sims heart, you'll have to open the terminal up and run the command

$ wine uninstaller

and if the game requires a CD check, well, that's a whole notha bawl game. I'm not there yet, but when I am, I'll gladly walk you through it c:

Cheers,
Anthony M. Adorno

Update: My previous post on changing the hostname is a FAILURE!

Hey guys,

I booted up my computer after doing the gksu update and there were quite a few errors. My advice: DON'T TRY IT, DRAGONS AHEAD! Instead, I've given up and conformed. Time to use sudo. So first you wanna do your average Ctrl-Alt-T keyboard shortcut (or launch your Terminal). After that, you can easily do a sudo command to change your systems name.

$ sudo gedit /etc/hostname
-A text file should pop up with the current name. Change it to the desired name and then click save. Close this text field, you're done with it.



$ sudo gedit /etc/hosts
-A text file should pop up with your computers current name on the second line. Change this as well to the SAME desired name and then click save.

Just to be safe, let's run a quick boot check and do a $ sudo reboot command for boredom. Everything should be in working order.

So I named it after a girl I liked ...

Hey unfortunate reader, how was your day?

Did you boot up Ubuntu and accidentally choose a really bad name for your PC? Name it after the girl you like that doesn't like you back? Did you name it something ridiculous like Woodja Blowme?

I thought you might have, so I got my PC here and I figured I'll show you how to remove that name and replace it with something more appropriate. First, pull up your terminal with Ctrl-Alt-T. Now you want to type

$ gksu gedit /etc/hostname

A text file popped up, huh? What's that? It only has your computers name? Change it now! While you've got the chance! Then click save. Now that we're all done here, close your terminal and then re-open it. it should say yourusername@yournewcomputername.

Now you won't be reminded of your stupid mishap every time you open the terminal. Thank goodness!

Cheers,
Anthony M. Adorno

First Day with Ubuntu 11.10

Hi!

My name is Anthony Michael Adorno. I'm an average eighteen year old loser. My father gave me his old laptop as a loaner and it has Windows Vista on it. I didn't like this, at all. It was slow, the wireless drivers sucked and I couldn't do any work on it because it just snailed along this way and that. Depressing stuff, I swear it. I needed a solution. Ubuntu 11.10. It worked, the laptop is literally reborn. It's like I breathed some life into this thing with my old U11.10 CD. I'm very pleased with the results.

Then I hit a brick wall.

After all the updates, my drivers for the wireless network were all screwy. I needed the right ones installed and they were just not being very cooperative.

Enter the Terminal.

I opened up the terminal and first checked if the wireless connection was blocked. To open the terminal, you want to key stroke Ctrl+Alt+T. Once that terminal is up, run this check.

$ rfkill list

The response was no to both the hard and soft block. So I had to dive deeper into the problem. This is where Google.com (the best search engine in my opinion) came into the picture. By searching known issues with my wireless card and Ubuntu 11.10 I found that having the wrong drivers installed was a pretty common thing for some issue. I had to fix that.

First, I had to get the correct driver, install it, then remove the wrong one. After that, a quick reboot and the problem was solved. If you have a Broadcom BCM4311 Wireless Card, this could very well fix the problem.

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

$ sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

$ sudo reboot

The whole process takes about ten minutes to complete, and I don't think it took me more than five. As I explore this OS more I'll update the blog.